Category: Comment on News | Page 5

March 20, 2014

Teoman Dudak, New Turkish Hero Online

Westerner’s such as all of the analysts at HamiltonFinanceServices.com have never heard of Teoman Coskun Dudak, the latest social net hero of Turkey. If not for the data scraping services of Vocativ.com, most people throughout the world could never hear of him.

And what did Dudak do? He just did his job as a customs inspector at a Turkish airport. He refused to let a plane loaded with 1.5 tons of gold under false papers take off despite being offered a generous bribe by Iranian businessman Reza Sarrab. Sarrab called a Turkish politician, the then minister of the economy, Zafer Caglayan, who authorized take off of the gold laden plane. For his part, Dudak was immediately transferred south to a post on the Syrian border. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/88b881f0-af53-11e3-bea5-00144feab7de.html#axzz2wWxzdYcI

How do you and I know about Dudak today? Turkish citizens heard about Dudak when unidentified sources complained on various social networks about the unfair treatment of Dudak for being so honest. For his part, Dudak declined comment. However, as word spread throughout Turkey of Dudak’s honesty, the story was scraped up by data miners and now the world knows the Dudak story.

Why did Turkish citizens like the story in the first place? Apparently bribery among government officials runs so rampantly that many citizens feel frustrated and intolerant of such dishonesty. Dudak became a folk hero because he brought back a sense of honor in a nation sickened by its leaders’ lack of honor.

What do you think?

March 20, 2014

DeepFace by Facebook Is Better than FBI’s Best, Called NGI

Facebook, ever on the edge chasing dollars better than most, has announced DeepFace, its facial recognition program that more than 97% of the time gets it right. http://www.vocativ.com/culture/science/facebooks-facial-recognition-tech-now-better-fbis-heres-thats-scary/

Despite spending more than a billion dollars, the best the FBI’s new program, Next Generation Identification (NGI), can do is about 80%. Of course, Facebook’s commercial agenda differs significantly from the FBI’s law enforcement mission.

Nonetheless, analysts at HFS note that much of the planet is moving away from anonymity towards something never before known, at a rapid pace. Will the new Facebook tech be used by law enforcers through their Open Mind software? Of course it will.

What do you think?

March 20, 2014

Iran Does What Many Others Do by Convicting Babaei on False Charges

When Iranian authorities arrested, quickly convicted, and imprisoned Hamid Babaei in July 2013 for spying, no one in the airport openly watched although perhaps a few eyes glanced a look or two. No one there knew Babaei because he had been an Iranian academic, a doctoral student of law and finance who lived with his spouse, Cobra Parsajoo, in a flat near the University of Liege in Belgium. He and his wife had been in Iran during a semester break to visit family and they were returning to school through the Khomeni Airport in Tehran when he was singled out of the line of passengers, and that was the last most of his family and friends heard of him. http://www.amnestyusa.org/search/node/babaei‎

Was he really a spy? Not in the least, according to his spouse, but that’s where the story becomes more interesting. While in Belgium, Babaei had been approached by insistent representatives of the Iranian government who demanded, unsuccessfully it turns out, that Babaei report to them about any protest activities of other Iranian students that might be interpreted as against Iran. Cobra Parsajoo, at great risk to her own freedom, has launched a social net campaign to tell the whole story about how her husband had been falsely accused of spying by the same government that asked him to spy and that convicted him of spying precisely because he declined to spy.

To analysts at HFS, the story, while sad and distressing, seems part of a larger pattern. What similar stories might be less well told in the US, Russia, China, North Korea, South Korea, or anywhere else where governments aggressively press for information about their own citizens as well as their enemies? Obviously, no one has an answer to that question.

Is there any hope of getting more answers? Strangely, the answer might be ‘yes’ because of a news source just evolving called Vocativ. Like the secret weapon of law enforcers for the past ten years, Open Mind, a social net scraper that searches through millions of public posts across Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, Stumble, Tumbler, Reddit and…you get the picture, every other social net one might find, the Vocativ model uses a similar algorithm to scrape the same sources, but for the purpose of posting them for journalists worldwide who wish to follow up with research and writing. And Vocativ offers only one of several options for this service to journalists. Data mining companies have sprung up in every other place where the Internet functions.

So perhaps stories such as Hamid Babaei’s will reach many more. Will that change the tactics of aggressive governments that care little about small bits of collateral damage? No, not at all, but it might arm the rest of us a little more, and then who knows what would happen at the polls or on the streets?

What do you think?

March 19, 2014

Science Funded More With Philanthropy in US, Says NY Times

US Science Changes How It’s Funded

Government money paid to universities to conduct basic scientific research characterized the 20^th century way of funding US science. That science set much of the world’s science agenda. Not necessarily so in the 21^st century, as the US government and most state governments scrounge desperately for revenue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_States

Perhaps government funding will increase in coming years if the US economy recovers from The Great Recession of 2008-2009, but today in 2014 the brightest funding source coming toward America appears to be private money from rich Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?ref=science

Analysts at HFS note that at this moment, the US budget for all research & development through universities and government agencies totals about $140 B. So private funding of R&D, as of yet not calculated in any form that can be reasonably compared with the US federal budget for 2014, will not reach that level. Nonetheless, as discretionary funds decline for the US government, watching how R&D survives may prove exciting.

Private funding of basic science combines a focus derived from personal crises of philanthropists with the drive, persistence, and tenacity of successful business owners unmatched by historic government agencies driven under political agendas. The New York Times article cited above lists a few dozen philanthropists by name, but in coming years, perhaps the list will cover many of the additions to a list of new ideas that will change the world. Yet, as the Chinese economy grows in prosperity and world influence, their science agenda will certainly reflect different priorities than either private or government budgets in the US.

What do you think?

March 19, 2014

Flux in Net’s Back End

Flux In Net’s Back End

The Internet today provides billions of individuals across the planet with access to an expanding, changing array of information, which in turn serves as the foundation for the socioeconomic phenomenon known as the Information Age. The ‘back end’ of this electronic net delivers names and addresses for distinct sites operated by individuals, usually collected into a group to carry out the numerous functions of sites or websites. That back end now may change how it operates, or in other words, it is in a state of flux.

In late 2012 an initiative in the UN World Conference on International Communications pushed by Russia and China as a telecommunications initiative sought to wrest control of the net’s back end from the US. The proposal sounded innocent, even worth consideration, but fortunately the idea of change raised the hairs on someone’s neck. http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/9/3747402/countries-propose-greater-itu-influence The 2012 effort to let the UN politicize Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and domain name registrations failed, but interest in the idea persists.

So how are IP addresses and domain names managed today? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) system began in 1998 when the early manager of IP addresses and domain names, Network Solutions, amended its organizing agreement. ICANN, under a contract the the US Department of Commerce, National Telecommunications & Information Administration, became responsible for the back end of the Internet with revisions to its charter as recent as 2009. Under a Registration Accreditation Agreement (RAA) made in 2009, enforcement of registration rules would be applied to all Internet users worldwide.

Now a powerful but small group of world governments seek to take control of the that back end process, with the clear purpose of imposing political criterion for how Internet names and numbers work in the background.

To analysts at HFS, the current state of flux in the net’s back end may determine for the foreseeable future how the world interacts electronically through the Internet. Further, as increasing political agendas flood the floor of debate and negotiations, alternatives to government controlled systems will become an urgent priority among those aware of the debate. With disclosures about NSA spying saturating the cyber world, the US has lost valuable credibility, and others now play on the uncertainty associated with lack of moral leadership.

What do you think?

March 18, 2014

Is Blogging Safe Where You Write? Not So In Viet Nam

Pham Viet Dao, a 62-year old blogger who was arrested nine months ago in Hanoi, will begin his trial tomorrow on charges of “abusing democratic freedoms” by writing comments perceived as critical of the Hanoi government under Viet Nam’s controversial Article 258. http://www.voanews.com/content/another-vietnamese-blogger-is-set-for-trial/1873933.html

He is the second blogger to be prosecuted under the new law. Several weeks ago Truong Duy Nhat received a two-year sentence for a similar blogging violation, after a trial court found him guilty. https://en.rsf.org/vietnam-blogger-truong-duy-nhat-gets-two-04-03-2014,45953.html

Pham Viet Dao promises to appeal any adverse decision by the trial court in his case. http://threatened.globalvoicesonline.org/blogger/pham-viet-dao-0

Analysts at HFS, while sympathetic to both Truong Duy Nhat and Pham Viet Dao, warn all bloggers everywhere by repeating our view of today’s Internet: The Internet exists only at the pleasure of the government where its servers exist, and no individual is fully free to express opinions or release information that threaten the government where that individual logs on. If you want to change the Web we have to the Web we want, consider how that might be done where you live.

One approach by those who consider grass roots efforts useful should read the blog at http://WebWeWant.org.

What do you think?

March 18, 2014

Ivanpah Solar Is World’s Most Productive

Solar In America: One Bright Spot in California

Despite the US report that under 1% of its power derives from solar energy, a team consisting of Bechtel, NRG, BrightSource Energy, and Google, have built and continue building final parts of a 377-megawatt solar facility in the Mojave Desert of California located in a nondescript town called Ivanpah. The five square mile collection of 173,500 heliostats will power 140,000 California homes. http://www.bechtel.com/ivanpah.html

The shear volume of the project puts the US ahead of Germany, the most solarized energy infrastructure in the world, for amount of energy generated with solar.

Analysts at HFS, aware of the questionable economics behind Ivanpah, wonder when much more efficient energy sources such as LENR using something like a Rossi-Focardi device might be introduced into the US energy mix, as it has been in Italy and three other European nations since 2011. http://alfin2300.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-on-rossi-focardi-lenr-device-and.html

What do you think?

March 18, 2014

How the US Justifies Its Drones

Justifying Drones: How the US Defines ‘War’ Unlike All Others

In December 2013, after a lengthy surveillance period and numerous top secret debates about what to do, a US drone controlled at a location half a world away from Rad’a, Yemen, decimated a wedding party filled with confirmed Al-Qaeda war targets. That’s the US story. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/03/report-casts-light-us-drone-programme-201431582649552511.html

No other nation-state on the planet agrees with underlying assumptions and definitions of the US story of Rad’a, however. The members of the wedding party were predominately civilians, and therefore the US drone attack killed illegally. That’s the world’s story. http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/02/19/us-yemen-drone-strike-may-violate-obama-policy

A significant source of disagreement between the Rad’a stories arises from the refusal of US officials to explain details of the attack. Without details all must limit their arm-chair reflections to consideration of larger ideas and reasoning, say analysts at HFS.

From the perspective of larger ideas, one stands out as an obvious difference between the US and the rest of the world: The definition of war. To the world’s generally accepted history of international law, all the world is presumed to be at peace except in regions where, by consensus agreement of all nations, a state of hostility exists. Those regions are called war zones. The rules of war apply within these war zones and only within these war zones.

In contrast, to the US the entire world is at war and therefore the rules of war apply across the globe. US President George W. Bush (son of President George H. W. Bush) defined the global war in several speeches, and US President Barack Obama today agrees with that definition, based on his continuation of strategies derived directly from this definition of war.

If the global war view dominates national strategy, it means that all persons supporting that global war become legitimate targets. They are not ‘civilians’ by definition, if the war is global. They are only civilians if one first believes they reside in a place where peace and the laws associated with peace control.

To analysts at HFS, this contrast in fundamental world views accounts for much of how the US and the rest of the world interact.

What do you think?

March 17, 2014

Rubenstein Posted To Syria by Kerry

Today US Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Daniel Rubenstein as a special US envoy to Syria, replacing now retired envoy Robert Ford. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-names-new-special-envoy-for-syria/2014/03/17/bbcc483a-add0-11e3-b8b3-44b1d1cd4c1f_story.html

Daniel Rubenstein served as Consul General and Chief of Mission in Jerusalem from September 6, 2009 to August 2012, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/daniel_rubenstein.html

To HFS analysts, the interesting point to this new Syrian appointment is not so much Daniel Rubenstein’s impeccable credentials as a US career diplomat as it is his impeccable reputation in the Jewish American community.

What do you think?

March 17, 2014

Russia Wins Referendum In Crimea, Now What?

No Surprise: 95% of Voters in Crimea Vote to Join Russia

More than 95% of voters in yesterday’s referendum support Russia’s takeover of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine, says chairman of the Sevastopol legislative assembly Yuri Doynikov. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/mar/17/crimea-votes-to-leave-ukraine/

Voter turnout reached 80%. http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_17/Referendum-in-Crimea-official-result-to-be-announced-on-17-March-first-data-show-96-vote-for-Russia-7828/

Both the voting results and world reactions seemed fully predictable. Hague spokesmen called the referendum a mockery. http://www.focus-fen.net/news/2014/03/17/330130/crimea-result-makes-a-mockery-of-democracy-says-hague.html

Stock markets ended in the red last week before the referendum. http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/126581/stock-market-news-for-march-17-2014

Western governments now mull adding sanctions to those already to be approved later today. http://www.tolonews.com/en/afghanistan/14214-crimea-votes-to-join-russia-west-mulls-new-sanctions

HFS analysts forecast continued anxiety in the stock markets despite the referendum, as fallout from Crimean politics appears to have just begun.

What do you think?